Deep into woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the map lies tranced, pine-tree shakes down its sighs upon this cartographer's head, yet all were vain, unless the cartographer's eye were fixed upon the stream before them.

As every one knows, maps and cartography are wedded for ever. But here is a Cartographer, desiring to map the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. There stand trees, here sleeps meadow, up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.

Take any path that carries you down in a dale and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. Let the most absentminded of maps be plunged in deepest reveries, stand that map on it's legs, set it's feet going Should you ever be athirst, your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical cartouche.

Look! Here come more maps. Noting will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder will not suffice. And there they stand—leagues coming from north, east, south, and west. Does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses attract them thither?

Circumambulate the city. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels stand thousands of maps. Leaning against the spiles; seated upon the pier-heads; looking over the bulwarks of ships. These are all maps. Tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? What do they here?

Your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with it's surf. The streets take you waterward. Downtown is the battery, where that noble map is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes. Look at the crowds of map-gazers there.

This mapping is the substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish I quietly take to map making. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean of cartography.

When I find myself growing grim about the mouth; when I find myself pausing before coffin warehouses, and especially when my hypos get an upper hand, that it requires a moral principle to prevent me from stepping into the street, and knocking hats off. Then. I account it high time to get mapping.

Map librarians! How much the more pains ye take to please the world, by so much the more shall ye for ever go thankless! Gulp down your tears; for your friends who have gone before are clearing the heavens against you. Here ye strike splintered hearts—there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!

So fare thee well, map librarian. Thou belongest to that hopeless, sallow tribe which no wine of this world will ever warm. But with whom one sometimes loves to sit, and grow convivial upon tears; and say to them with full eyes and empty glasses, and in not altogether unpleasant sadness—Give it up!

You must not, take the higgledy-piggledy map, however authentic, for veritable gospel. These maps are solely valuable, as affording a glancing bird’s eye view of what has been promiscuously said, thought, fancied, and sung of cartography, by many nations and generations, including our own.

Ishmael on the Anthropocene "it’s too late to make any improvements now. The universe is finished; the #copestone is on, and the chips were carted off a million years ago. As old Dives says "give me the privilege of making my own summer with my own coals."
CHAPTER 2. The Carpet-Bag #orTheWhale

But clicking on your profile I just see this one post not your Mastodon back catalogue… I

I can see this post

M-A Murphy. (2020). Revisioning ‘The Visionaries’: A Critical Pedagogy of Place, Settler Implication, and Modes of Selected Remembrance & Erasure on Papaschase Cree Land (University of Alberta campus). Verges: Germanic and Slavic Studies Review.
journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ve...